All, I'm reaching out to ask about your business' established best practice for tracking and reporting on project implementation date(s). I'm on a Project Management team that handles primarily Waterfall projects with a few Agile projects sprinkled into the mix, so I would be interested to hearing your thoughts on either methodology. Our Current State We have two custom date fields on our general project form, Target Implementation and Actual Implementation . The PM is responsible for maintaining this "Target" date along with their normal update activities. The Actual Implementation date should only be entered in the week of implementation or once the date is no longer subject to change. An important note here, we have project monitoring and closeout tasks that continue after implementation, so we aren't able to use any of Workfront's native date fields. As an example, Target Implementation dates are socialized on a Quarterly Implementation Schedule we produce for the business and Projects with an upcoming or recent Target/Actual Implementation date are given a passing mention during a Weekly Performance Review with business unit owners. There are a handful of other situations and ways that these dates are socialized. Pain Points All PMs are not created equal and some can even be forgetful at times, neglecting to update their Implementation dates, creating a scramble to get all the projects to filter onto the appropriate reports before they are pulled up in a meeting with executive leadership. As we mature in our use of Workfront, we would like to have these dates to be calculated from the project schedule, i.e. the task list. I have experimented replacing the implementation dates with the planned/actual completion dates for a task aligned to our implementation milestone. As a concept this works great for waterfall, but becomes burdensome when considering agile projects and their multiple implementations. TL;DR . What does your organization do to track and report on implementation dates when they don't line up with a Project's Completion dates. I appreciate all of you that have taken the time to read my novel and even more so anyone who feels inclined to share their own business practices on the topic. Happy Trails. Erich Giltinan
